Leilei Zhang possesses a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology and a master’s degree in industrial biotechnology. After four years of working experience in an agri-farmaceutical company as a researcher, she started her Ph.D. in Plant and Environmental Sciences (Agrisystem) at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart. She researched the impact of micro- and nanoplastics on soil and plant systems from a multi-omics perspective. In detail, she has studied the impact of different particle sizes and concentrations of polyethylene microplastics on important crops through different approaches: i) phenotyping via hyperspectral imaging, ii) high-resolution metabolomics, iii) and metagenomics. Her findings reflect an integrative response to microplastics, involving the induction of oxidative stress. She has generated a vast quantity of results obtained by high throughput technologies which are being integrated at a computational level with the assistance of machine learning algorithms, thus revealing the broad effect of microplastics on crops.